READ MORE

The city of Torrance will pay $1.8 million to a Redondo Beach surfer who was mistakenly shot at by its police officers during the manhunt for rogue Los Angeles police Officer Christopher Dorner, officials announced Thursday.

The agreement settles David and Lizzette Perdue’s lawsuit against the city and its Police Department, ending the acrimonious battle over what occurred that chaotic week in February 2013. Officers rammed Perdue’s truck thinking he was Dorner fleeing a shooting, then fired three shots at him.

Although the settlement admits no fault, Torrance Police Chief Mark Matsuda said Thursday the shooting was a mistake “from the standpoint that we ended up shooting at somebody who was not who we thought it was.

“They were trying to protect the community and were proactively going out there thinking that this is a guy who was armed, who had been using assault rifles,” Matsuda said. “There is not a great way to try to engage somebody like that.

“For them to decide to use their car to intervene and take that action, it took a lot of courage to do that. That’s where we get to the totality of everything that occurred before that, that led them to that point, and then it turned out not to be him.”

Della Thompson-Bell, an attorney for the city of Torrance, said paying attorneys’ fees of up to $1 million for a federal jury trial factored into the decision to settle.

Federal court records showed Perdue’s attorney, Robert Sheahen, filed a notice to dismiss his lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles shortly before 1 p.m. Thursday.

“The Perdue family wishes to thank the city of Torrance and the attorneys for the city of Torrance for their work in getting this matter resolved and for their thorough professionalism at all times,” Sheahen said.

Since filing the lawsuit, Sheahen had sought an amount similar to what the city of Los Angeles paid to each of two newspaper carriers who came under fire from Los Angeles police officers just moments before the Torrance police shooting. Each woman received $2.1 million. One of them was wounded.

Perdue, 39, alleged in his lawsuit that Officer Brian McGee nearly killed him on Feb. 7, 2013, when McGee and his partner, Officer Erin Sooper, rammed his truck and fired three shots at him on Flagler Lane near Beryl Street. The bullets went through the driver’s side window of Perdue’s Honda Ridgeline, narrowly missing him, and then struck the windshield.

Advertisement

Perdue, on his way to pick up a friend, had driven into the confusion surrounding the search for Dorner, a fired LAPD Harbor Division officer who vowed in an online manifesto to take revenge on the families of the LAPD officials who fired him.

Dorner had already killed a police officer’s daughter and her boyfriend in Irvine, and that morning shot a Riverside County police officer to death and wounded another.

Torrance police officers were well aware that one of Dorner’s targets — a high-ranking LAPD official — lived on Redbeam Avenue, and that LAPD officers had taken positions there to protect him and his family.

Perdue was in his truck around the block when eight LAPD officers mistakenly opened fire on two newspaper carriers in a Toyota Tacoma they believed were Dorner approaching the house. One woman was hit in the back.

Seeing Perdue’s truck around the block and hearing the shots, McGee and Sooper believed Dorner was headed toward them. They rammed the truck and McGee fired three shots.

Dorner actually was miles away in his gray Nissan Titan. He was killed five days later in a gunbattle with San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies in Big Bear, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Two deputies were shot during the exchange, one fatally.

From the start, Torrance police officials did not call the shooting a mistake, but said it was a result of the confluence of events that surrounded it. Officers knew Dorner had previously scouted the officer’s house under protection on Redbeam Avenue, that he had killed a police officer and wounded another in Riverside County earlier that morning, and heard a report — later determined to be inaccurate — that Dorner was headed west on the 105 Freeway toward the South Bay.

Matsuda said at least four officers involved in the incident that morning received special training afterward. Gradually, other officers in the department are undergoing training to learn what to do in similar situations.

In a statement, the department said police officials have “reviewed our tactics, training, procedures, and any decision making which potentially impacted our performance during this incident.”

Sooper is now serving as a school resource officer. McGee was assigned to the department’s communications bureau following the shooting. Matsuda said it was in McGee’s and the public’s best interest to assign him to work in the 9-1-1 dispatch center, but he will eventually return to patrol.

“He has a lot of time left in his career,” Matsuda said.

The District Attorney’s Office announced in January that neither officer acted criminally, saying the shooting occurred during “an atmosphere of fear and extreme anticipation” and that the shooting was a “reasonable mistake.”

Prosecutors are still reviewing the actions of the LAPD officers, said a spokesman for the District Attorney’s Office.